


Unbound

by orphan_account



Series: those that awakened [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (also, Family, Finn understands the force through color, Force-Sensitive Finn, Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Gen, Jedi Training, Leia and Finn are both yellow, a visual rebellion of sorts, as we all well know), but different yellows, compassion for droids, from the monochrome First Order, he'll eventually get a yellow lightsaber
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 21:24:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9203747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: They all fell away and for the first time in years, the world around him came into focus.He looked up at Leia and her eyes were shining, a sad grin stretched across her weathered cheeks.“Finn,” she asked softly, “Is that you?”





	

“Come in, Finn.”

Finn paused mid-step in his pacing and glanced across the hall. The door remained sealed. Finn, by all reasonable reckoning, should've found this unnerving: the general calling to him from within soundproof walls. Strangely though, he was comforted in his bewilderment. It meant he had come to right place.

“You may enter, Finn. Pacing won’t do you a lick of good.”

Finn stared for another second at the door, took a deep breath, and held his new ID card up to the scanner at the door’s right. He stepped into the room and up to the General’s desk with precise and snappish footfalls, his arms held straight and loose at his sides, his hands curled, and, hopefully, his face blank. She didn’t look up at him, using one hand to sign off on the emergency supply runs delivered a few minutes before, and using the other to twirl a set of stones in the air in increasingly intricate patterns.

He waited for her to speak, keeping his eyes on a spot next to her left ear.

She rolled her eyes and said wryly, “At ease.”

He complied.

She let the stones drop as she reached for her comm. “Supply run ready. I’ve included some new additions. Uploaded to central database.”

A reply buzzed, “Affirmative, General. I’ll let Snap know.”

She then tossed her communicator unceremoniously onto the desk and leaned back in her chair with a sigh.

“Alright, Finn,” she said, with a welcoming wave. “What is it you need at so late an hour?”

The General and Finn were the only pair left in the central command room of the recommissioned New Republic Naval ship (a welcome gift to the Resistance from a terrified government only just now waking up to their supreme vulnerability). The skeleton crews were rarely made up of tacticians and bargaining leaders and had no business to be anywhere but the bridge, engineering, and battle stations. A maintenance droid, recovered from an old First Order base, was scrubbing along the wide floor, a familiar sound to Finn who had once been worth just as much to his peers and commanders. It was possible that Finn was still an equal to the mouse droid in the Resistance, in operational value if not intrinsic worth, but that would only be because of the significantly higher opinion everyone outside the Order apparently had of droids.

The room was dark but splashed with a purple glow from a nebula drifting in the void outside the window. It was quiet.

Yet Finn could feel Leia amongst the emptiness. If he closed his eyes and covered his ears, he would still know she was there. She was a solid presence of warm gold just beneath the surface of everything he sensed in the room. This was what he came here for.

“I wanted to speak to you in private,” he said, still not meeting her eyes.

“And why is that?”

“I want to be reassigned," Finn blurted out, resisting every urge in his body to slap a hand over his mouth for speaking in such a way. He took a moment to breathe deeply and consciously through a wave of nausea threatening to overbalance him. He remained upright and shut his eyes against the noise in his head.

_I’m allowed to want. I’m allowed to want._ _I'm allowed to want. I'm allowed to want._

He opened his eyes and instantly knew he had taken more than a moment to collect himself. He met the General’s eyes and saw a similar shade of sympathy to the one that crossed Poe's face frequently, as much as the man tried to hide it. 

“You’re going to have to give some good reasons as to why you want a new assignment,” she began, a small smile taking away any edge that would have accompanied the words otherwise. “We could really use some leadership in our ground troops. Your hand to hand and blaster expertise are already worth quite a lot to the cause - add that to the frankly unprecedented score on your tactical aptitude test..."

Finn could hear echoes of past examinations, of former squad leaders sizing up his body and talking over his head to Phasma about what a good  _soldier_ he was. The General's steely eyes were shifting in front of him into a chrome, emotionless surface and the soft blue of her vest was melting into gray. 

Shoving aside the repulsion he interrupted her, saying sharply, "I won't be what they made me."

He wrenched his gaze from her, gaining strength in his conviction. He watched the mouse droid scrub out of the room, no doubt to gossip with the rest of the droids, as BB-8 had once told him, in confidence, that maintenance droids are fond of doing. Leia patiently waited for him to collect himself again, demonstrating yet again that everything Finn had ever learned about authority was neither absolute nor prescriptive. This obvious distinction of attitude between his old Captain and the woman in front him helped him push forward with his request.  

“I was being packaged for command. I was Phasma’s favorite,” Finn began again, less heated. "I only learned the things I know for, well, for survival. I was only selected for the command track because I was already set apart from everyone else. But, General, I promise I can do so much more than lead ground troops. Not that there's anything wrong with them!" He placated quickly at her slight frown. "I'm - I'm honored you would consider me an asset to the Pathfinders and others, it's just, I've been keeping something from you, mostly out of habit, because it's kind of big deal, maybe, I'm not entirely sure, that's why I'm here, really, to make sure, to ask you to maybe consider helping me -"

"Finn," she said gently, eyes slightly wide. "How can I help?"

A piercing note of tension grew distant in his mind at the simple question. He relaxed enough to take a deep breath before saying, "I think I'm just going to show you."

He let his head drop forward and folded his arms behind his back. He focused in on a single dirty smudge on the floor between the toes of his boots. He held one breath in for as long as he could handle, then let it go slowly. He imagined taking off his armor. With another breath he started letting the tight coiled rope bound around his limbs unwind. Starting with the muscles in his feet, ankles, calves, thighs, wrists, arms, shoulders, the top of his head and his chest, and finally his stomach. They all fell away and for the first time in years, the world around him came into focus.

He looked up at Leia and her eyes were shining, a sad grin stretched across her weathered cheeks.

“Finn,” she asked softly, “Is that you?”

Now the empty room was not just full of Leia’s solid presence, stony gold yet shimmering with dark blues and velvety greens, but now held Finn’s liquid presence as well, yellow and pink and so bright, like sunlight on an ocean at dawn. Finn felt his way through the room, touching the essence behind chairs and tables, tasting the air with splashes and sprays. He hadn’t been this free since he first discovered this affinity all those years ago as a child, desperately wishing for a different life than the one he had been dealt.

Leia stood up, wading through the waves of his mind unbound and came to him. She reached up and with a shaking hand brushed away a tear from his face.

“You are so brave, Finn,” she whispered. “To be this strong in the Force and to have kept it a secret for so long. How did you do it?”

He shook his head and simply replied, “I had to, I suppose. I always new I had to keep it from them. When I was little, it was a refuge. I thought it was a fantasy land that only I could access. I kept it a secret at first because I didn't want them to take it all away.”

She grasped his hand as he spoke and he felt so warm and welcomed in that moment, it was getting more and more difficult to speak.

“There weren’t any Force-users around at the time. When…” he paused, “When Kylo Ren joined the Order, I had already developed the habit of keeping it wound up. They had him inspect the ranks, once, for potential recruits into the Knights of Ren. I was so terrified, it was probably what distracted him from my abilities."

Ironically, (if he really wanted to think about it) if it hadn’t been for the intensive training he and the other troopers had gone through from childhood he would never have been able to keep his ability under lock and key. The discipline and unwavering physical exertion allowed him to let out the Force and it’s power over him, through him, in small ways everyday so the tight bounds he kept on it never suffocated, just shielded. He put the extra work in with the blasters, with the tactical training, with the medical training, with it all, but he also put in whatever he could so as not to drown in the power of the Force.

He didn’t know it was the Force until they taught him about the shameful fall of the Empire, about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa. By that point, he had already known that eventually he was going to run away.

“I want you to teach me,” he said, squeezing her hands. “Please, I don’t know much more than hiding it. I want to help.”

Her cheeks, normally pale, and her eyes, normally withdrawn, were alight with recognition and purpose.

“Of course I’ll teach you," she said fervently, releasing him and darting around her desk to open a drawer. "I never became a Jedi, not fully, but I can teach you the basics and even show you all the ways to use the Force even if you aren't a Jedi. We'll start right away. I've got a few books I think will be very helpful to understand and tomorrow I'll show you some meditative techniques and of course we'll have to start you on saber training right away, though I'm sure you'll pick it up very quickly, you're very clever, I can sense it in the Force, even -"

Finn's heart fluttered at the thought of lessons with her and at the bright smile she kept sending his way as she dug through old datapads and reports. The steely gold aura outlining her face and hands was pulsing with what Finn assumed was hope. He suspected this was a fundamental building block of the General, of the person that she was, and now it was shining. It was shining because of him. 

 

Tears were leaking from his eyes again but she just kept talking. 

"I'll reassign you to my side, of course, until Rey and Luke return, and you can decide then what you want to do," she said, handing over the collected educational items in a neat stack. "I know you expressed interest in becoming a medic when you were assigned to the Pathfinders, so, if you want, you can still do a bit more training under Dr. Kalonia. Luke told me that many of the old Jedi used to be healers, and, Finn-" she placed a hand on his shoulder, slowly so as not to startle him "-you have the soul for it. For healing, I mean. You remind me so much of my brother, before all this happened. Your heart is  _powerful._ Don't forget that."

Finn lifted his right hand to hers and held on through the waves of her understanding and compassion. 

"Thank you, Leia," he whispered, looking down at his new reading material. 

"You deserve more than this war, Finn," she replied. "But while we're here, I'll give you whatever I can."

Finn nodded, eyes still cast down. His back ached and burned, he was exhausted, bodily and mentally fatigued from his physical therapy and constant nightmares. He sometimes felt as if he was drowning in all the noises of _people_ , so many free personalities, so loud and foreign. He felt more and more alone the more he learned of the things he had lost the day he had stolen. He missed the phantom family he never knew. He missed Rey. 

At least in this, he could finally feel secure.

At least in this, he could finally feel safe.


End file.
